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CWmike writes "Microsoft's CEO strongly hinted this week that the company will craft a Metro-style version of the next Office suite. 'You ought to expect that we are rethinking and working hard on what it would mean to do Office Metro style,' Ballmer told a Wall Street analyst. Metro, a tile- and touch-based interface borrowed from Windows Phone 7, would be a massive change for Office, one that would dwarf the 'ribbonization' that set off a firestorm of complaints about Office 2007's new look. The criticism died down, and Microsoft later extended the ribbon in Office 2010 and Windows 7. It will ribbonize other components of Windows 8, notably the OS's file manager. One analyst believes Metro Office is a done deal. 'I think they need something in Metro to enable people to work on documents on tablets,' said Rob Helm, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. 'They need something on ARM.'"

Two things. First, you personally are not their target market for UIs. If you don't like the ribbon, it doesn't matter because they won't change it.

Second, all the slamming of the ribbon is really tired tempest-in-a-teapot stuff. Find a more meaningful problem to worry about.. Right now, you sound pretty whiny because you can't get over something so trivial. Four years ago there was an insignificant change to a product with no more than a five year lifespan. Let it go.

jwegman might not be the target market, but I sure am, as an employee in a Fortune Global 500 company with an IT department so conservative that we finally migrated company laptops/desktops to Vista and Office 2007 last year. That is not a typo. We migrated to Vista after 7 came out. This was allegedly because certain intranet applications were not certified to work with Windows 7, but anyway.

I am still not as productive in Office 2007 as I was with previous versions of Office, and neither is everyone el

I am still not as productive in Office 2007 as I was with previous versions of Office

If something that minor was all it took to make you "not as productive" you should start thinking about how you're going to live on the measly amount that unemployment insurance pays because you are not worth wasting a W-2 form.

Ummm what? Hypothesis contrary to fact? Windows 7 goes very nicely back to the Classic Windows Look-and-Feel (except for the start menu, which I'm ok with that). If you wanted something truly customizable maybe you should have gone with a customizable OS (like Linux)?

A Metro office will probably just have the ribbon, but BIGGER! They probably sat around thinking "How can we infuriate Office users this year? We already doubled the amount of space the UI takes up while exposing them to less features..." and then some bright spark goes "Let's double it agaiiiinnnn!:D"

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for tidying up interfaces, and the ribbon is a good try; but that's as high as my praise will go. It's a try, not a success. It's a designer's attempt at trying to figure out w

You won't be laughing when they introduce Office NBR (Nothing But Ribbon) which has optimized the document portion of the interface away to avoid distraction from the hypnotic, all consuming awesomeness of The Ribbon (blessed be its name).

No kidding...with my clients I had exactly 1 that is using office 2010, all of the others actually went backwards to office 2003 after the ribbon stuff gave secretaries fits. I had one spend nearly 10 grand only to go back to the old version about 6 months later, they just couldnt adjust macros were broken, templates had issues, it was a mess.

'I think they need something in Metro to enable people to work on documents on tablets,' said Rob Helm, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. 'They need something on ARM.'"

Sure, but that doesn't mean that there will be no more desktop version of office. These will be two different office suites that can inter-operate: Traditional desktop Office, and Metro Office. Since it sounds like tablets will only be able to run the Metro-style apps, this is inevitable, and not a big deal.

I'm hoping that, since it runs Windows 8, you will be able to set it up landscape on a reading stand with a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Easy to get a smaller keyboard for portability; like the Apple one: with the detriment of no number pad. I'm not saying the Apple one is the solution, just that it's a good example of a compact keyboard. One I've tested before, and found it comfortable to type on despite my normally large keyboards.

For home use, if done right, I might just have only a Windows tablet so I

For this kind of scenario, I'd rather get an x86 Win8 tablet. That way you'll get the classic desktop for when you need it (which is when you dock it with mouse+keyboard). For all the talk about Metro unifying touch and mouse/keyboard, I can see it working well on tablets (one good thing about WP7 is its UI), but it's clearly going to be meh on desktops for any power user.

Is queer eye for the straight guy still on? I honestly thought this was going to be an article about Ballmer bringing the queer eye team to Redmond and having them do some work on Microsoft's headquarters...

This might have something to do with the fact that I have not used any "office suite" software in so long that I no longer associate "Office" with "Microsoft's collection of word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software." Or the fact that I did not know that Windows Phone 7's UI was called "Metro," and thought that Ballmer was seeking to "metro-ize" his office (which I believe is in Redmond).

I'll hand it to Ballmer for not beating a dead horse and try to wedge Office into a form factor that worked okay but didn't get critical mass (Windows tablets). Now he's going to wedge it using a new UI that probably won't work on ARM tablets. He's clearly moved on to beating dead mules.;)

This is one of those really dumb ideas that I hope catches on. Like... well... I can't think of another example.

The reason why it's dumb should be obvious: they're trying to port a program with an input that's 99% keystrokes over to a device that has no keyboard.

The reason why I hope it catches on is that it might encourage tablet hardware designers to start seriously considering adding some kind of hardware keyboard to their devices. No, the on-screen keyboard doesn't count. I have a touchscreen netbook and I still claim it's superior to tablets in almost every respect, but its weaknesses (shorter battery life, bulkier than a tablet, takes too long to power up) keep me from just keeping it in my pocket and using it whenever I have a spare 5 minutes.

Between the addition of a keyboard and a some of the tablet designers finally getting it through their heads that the only way to beat Apple is on price, I might just break down and buy a tablet.

Ha! Yeah, all this talk about the PC is dead, tablets, phones etc being the way is just telling me that the larger bulk of the market create NOTHING USEFUL in the world, other than to hand money to corps for toys. Content creation, whether it be writing code or English -- stories or screenplays -- intelligent posts, economic analyses - you name it, if it's valuable transformation of raw data into useful information, it went through a real keyboard, or it just plain takes way too long to get done.
.

Mobility seems cool to some people, but I don't really move around that much, and frankly find all these people pretending to be productive on their mobile devices are really just using them as excuses for impoliteness to those physically present around them. I'm perfectly happy to sit here, maintain my forums, trade stocks, write articles for publication on a good old fashioned box PC (well, yeah, it has displays that would shame the matrix, and 512 cuda cores along with an i7, so not that plain or that old fashione). I RUIN keyboards at no longer than 6 months intervals, typing way way over 120 wpm if I'm excited, and looking at this one (about 4 months) no numbers/letters on the keys, yet some big dips where my nails have actually eaten away the plastic. I will never, ever, be happy with a little texty keyboard, a touch screen one, or even my fairly nice laptop, which I do no creative work on whatever - it's too hard to type fast on that tiny thing (made for midgets?) and you're always accidentally clicking it's little smear-screen "mouse" when it's least handy. To hell with that. Just gimme a regular box.

Now that I'm (wisely, I think) back to zero mobile devices, when I do go out, my time is my own - I don't even know the onstar phone numbers for my cars and would never give them out if I did. Why is it that anyone who has your phone number is alright assuming you want to talk to them whenever THEY feel like it? Send me an email, I'll call you when *I* feel like it. Or see you F/F if possible - quality over quantity of mindless babble. These "mobile productivity enhancing devices" are an epic fail for actually getting anything done other than *talking* about getting something done./rant

I won't mind seeing the end of that brain dead bloated office suite. Haven't used it for years anyway. When I wrote my digital signal processing book, the publisher requested I NOT use junk like that -- just get the content right, we have people to make it pretty as we like - and we don't like having to deal with the junk most authors think makes their work better looking (in error). So, being a windows guy then, I used notepad(!). Of course, for the last decade, I don't run windows anymore anyway, sucks hard compared to linux. If I need it for some reason, there's virtual box...windows in a sandboxed window is about right for that piece of utter crap.

Use a bluetooth keyboard. Or just don't get a tablet if you really want a keyboard. I have both a netbook and a tablet, and though there is a lot of overlap, the tablet is great for reading, web browsing and youtube videos. It sucks for Slashdot though - the latest JavaScript stuff in Slashcode is really slowing things down..

The target use case for something like this is CXOs tweaking their Powerpoint presentations while on the plane, or proof reading and correcting reports while on the subway. No, you wouldn't want to make the whole thing on the tablet, but being able to make minor changes on the go is a useful feature.

Now we only need to get software that can properly use it. Honeycomb itself actually supports trackpad (and USB/bluetooth mice) and displays a mouse pointer that you can move around and interact using it. They've also updated their APIs to provide more fine-grained mouse events - hover, for example, distinct buttons, and so on. The stock OS itself is also somewhat keyboard-aware in that you can do Ctrl+X/C/V in text fields, tab between c

To me, MS is not so desperate to be different that they has started not only to screw it up by incompetence, but intentionally. There is some method to their madness. After all, if you look at what Office (and Windows) users routinely put up with and, judging by the fanboy comments here, actually believe works well, MS can make it a lot worse before people start to realize what an abomination this stuff really is. This is utterly evil of course.

...was going to be boring at some point. Apparently that point is now.

On the bright side something good may come out of this "dumb-down-the-product" approach made popular (and commercially perfected) by Apple. It worked great for them so since MS is trying to re-invent themselves, why not follow the same paradigm.

On the other hand, the pro users (a slight super set of the little crowd here at/.) think that the old one worked just fine, why mess with it, rightly so

It worked great for them so since MS is trying to re-invent themselves, why not follow the same paradigm.

Indeed. And they get to follow Apple's lead in getting users the world over to accept DRM'd hardware and walled gardens. They can convince users that mobile devices need to be meticulously managed by the OS vendor, and allowing you access of any kind below the shiny, barred exterior is bad and will lead only to bad things.

This is something Microsoft has dreamed of for years. Apple beat them to the punch

Does Microsoft understand that different form-factor requires different GUI design? They try to shove the one-size-fit-all approach to all the devices that they design, that's why they fail so hard.
You can't take a PC interface, with mouse and keyboard, and copy it directly over to a tablet, where an icon is too small to be touched precisely by a stylus.
You can't do serious document editing or spreadsheet on a phone / tablet so design those apps with a "good enough" feature set and let go.
You can't copy a panel-based interface to a keyboard and mouse environment.
Apple knows how to do those things: they have a scroller for the phone, a pop up for the tablet, and a plain old drop down for the computer. They make them "consistent" but far from identical, cause your interaction with them are different.

Windows has supported handwriting recognition for years, and still does in Win8 (assuming you have a digitizer that can recognize a stylus). Whether Word will support handwriting recognition within a doc directly, I don't know. OneNote already does, though.

Handwriting and typing each have their place. Typing is typically done at a desk or on your lap. Handwriting is good for when you're standing up or in the field. Further, you can handwrite things you can't type. Ever try to type an equation or a chart?

So here's the thing. Big tech is all about the verticals nowadays. Here's my future.

Apple showed us how it's done - having the CPU, the iDevice, the OS, developing carrier relations, an app store, a lot of apps and a developer community, and now a cross-device cloud service. Apple makes most of its money from the devices by the way.

Google's not letting down. After Eric Shmidt and Larry Page had their disagreement on whether Google should be fleshing out its own stack or consolidating around its "core busine

Apple can do this in a blink by the way. They have a powerful desktop OS they can just integrate straight into their mobile stack. They're already laying out the groundwork in fact - notice how you can show your iPad screen on an external display wirelessly? Notice how the "PC" was demoted below the cloud? Or how iDevices no longer require a PC tether?
Think how useful it'll be when your iPhone is running real desktop stuff in an app. And driving an external 30'' display and keyboard wirelessly.

Interesting scenario, but it is more likely that the phone will be a slave rather than a master. People lose phones and they get stolen, and there will always be terrifying pressure to extend battery life. It is more likely that everyone will have a a compute appliance [slashdot.org] of ever increasing horsepower somewhere in the relatively secure perimeter of their home or office to which their growing horde of devices are wirelessly connected, at least when their are nearby. More and more horsepower and storage, and damn the wattage. Many people do things like play games, create and edit digital content, and other things that continue to soak up compute cycles without any foreseeable limit. Google isn't stupid or shortsighted. I suspect they and Apple have a very good idea of what role phones will play over the next 20 years or so.

Microsoft, however (those dedicated stock price masturbators), are almost certainly clueless. If anyone is going to screw it up and forcibly, tenaciously extract failure from the jaws of success, it will be them.

Damn, where are mod points when you need them? Insightful comment indeed, and I agree with everything you said, particularly about a home compute appliance to which your mobile devices connect. And it's interesting you should say that Apple and Google have given the future of mobile much thought. Remember it was Jobs who coined the term "Digital Hub", and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it unspool very much like your prediction. I personally envision something along the lines of a Mac mini/Time Capsul

The slave and master analogy is a bit misleading because it lumps document storage and processing together and creates this false dichotomy of dumb powerless nodes vs thick clients. Reality just doesn't look like that anymore.

The phone will have processing (needed for an acceptable snappy UI, and because we need some form of CPU to drive it and even the cheapest/smallest ones are plenty powerful and growing by the day), will have local storage for OS and cloud-cached local storage (needed because the device

Interesting scenario, but it is more likely that the phone will be a slave rather than a master. People lose phones and they get stolen, and there will always be terrifying pressure to extend battery life.

Extending the battery life is easy - you just stuff dock with extra batteries which drive the system when phone is plugged in. Asus Transformer already does it with a tablet - dock it, and it gets twice as much battery life.

As for lost/stolen phones - by which I think you imply losing data - that wouldn't be a big deal in the "cloud" world where everything's automatically backuped to said cloud anyway.

It is more likely that everyone will have a a compute appliance [slashdot.org] of ever increasing horsepower somewhere in the relatively secure perimeter of their home or office to which their growing horde of devices are wirelessly connected, at least when their are nearby.

It's essentially what we have today with home WiFi. Problem is, it breaks down once you go outside the hous

There's some good points here, but the current productivity apps are almost all written for x86. It'll take a huge effort from Microsoft to convince all of them to make an ARM version for applications that 99% would like to use at a "real" desktop with monitor and keyboard. And it'll take even longer before the people who've already bought and paid for their software to buy those versions. I think you'll still have an ARM tablet and a x86 cpu for running desktop software for a looong time to come.

Some points here -1. A VERY substantial part of the productivity apps are made by microsoft. If they can compile Windows for ARM, they sure as hell can do so with Office, Project, Visio and what not. And once they move, well, vendors will too. Remember what happened when they turned UAC on by default on home PCs? Initially some chaos ensued, the vendors that were doing stuff outside your filesystem userspace miserably broke, and MS had to herd them all to step back in line, because Hey, grandma's computer n

X is just a conduit to stream a console over a network. Doesn't actually which apps you intend to stream and where are they going to come from.Google docs is a decade behind.

The big question here is "can you meet, or at least approach, the 'WinXP, MS Office and misc X86 apps for windows' bar on Android running on ARM?"It's the hardware to drive it, the OS to drive it, the applications and in many cases a way to tie into legacy stuff.

Microsoft is pushing Metro as their new UI, and (possibly, it sounds like Microsoft hasn't even decided) their only ARM SDK. Of course they have an Office port in the works. Otherwise, Office would be unsellable.

As you said, of course Microsoft is working on a Metro version of Office. They'd be crazy not to be. Office is Microsoft's cash cow, the castle that all their other ventures serve to protect, and it's probably the number one reason why people continue to use Windows. They, and everyone else (including Apple), were caught flatfooted by the runaway train that is the iPad, and I'm willing to bet that its incredible success sent deep chills through the executive suites in Redmond, when they realized that an entire vast new market was developing and they didn't even have a toehold in it. People want tablets (the argument over whether they want "tablets" or iPads can wait for another day), and Microsoft is faced with a twofold challenge: to have a viable tablet OS; and to develop a version of Office that can run on it.

Forgive me for not recalling the source, but I read a piece sometime last year about the severe political infighting inside Microsoft, and as an example the writer gave an anecdote about internal discussions concerning the creation of a touchscreen version of Office. The discussions came to an abrupt screeching halt when the head of the Office division at the time flatly refused to have anything to do with it. Try to imagine anyone at Apple telling Jobs that.

The article painted a portrait of a deeply dysfunctional company, riven by rivalries among the various divisions, and of Ballmer's part in the creation of a nightmarish corporate culture where backstabbing and naked ambition rule. One gets the distinct impression that Microsoft under Gates was like the former Yugoslavia under Tito, with only a strong personality holding together a loose confederation of rivals. With Gates's departure (Tito's death in the case of Yugoslavia), all the bitter divisions came bubbling to the surface, and not only was Ballmer incapable of controlling it, he seemed to actively encourage it in order to weaken potential rivals, similar to Milosevic's misrule in Serbia. Now it's biting Microsoft in the ass, as they find themselves culturally ill-equipped to respond quickly to an external threat.

As I said, they're faced with a twofold challenge, to succeed with a touchscreen device, and to have a version of Office that can run on it. Each by itself is an extremely difficult proposition. Success at both may prove to be an insurmountable problem.

You don't need to doubt it, just read the financial statement [microsoft.com]. Windows brings in $12B/year; Office+SharePoint+Exchange is $14B/year.

. In my territory, MS Office is selling at a slightly lower price than Windows. And not only that: it comes with 3-seat license, so it's effectively less than one-third the cost of a Windows license. Sure, this is the vanilla version that comes without the "enterprise" goodness of Access and the groupware tools, but for most people and small businesses having something to print out a quick report or do a spreadsheet of the week's expenses is more than enough.

Thing is, a single large business that buys several thousand, or even ten thousand, seats of enterprise edition "compensates" for a lot of those small home/office users in terms of income. And there are very few businesses with users in thousands that don't license Office for a significant proportion of their employees.

Wonderful! Microsoft saved lots of people a good wad of cash when they pushed the awful ribbon onto everyone's neck - more than a quarter of the people I know now use either OpenOffice or LibreOffice thanks to that clusterfuck. And I expect that ratio will increase as it becomes more mainstream.

Metro is absolute garbage on a desktop with a mouse. That being said, it's also no worse than anything done on iPhones, Android, or Windows Phones. But it should be only for touch-screens, preferably smartphones. Just as long as they KEEP IT THERE.

Only marketing would ever want Office to be run in Metro. But the Windows 8 devs on msdn, if you read their blogs, are very in-tune with things. Whatever culture that was spawned after the Halloween-documents in 1998 (yes, 13 years ago) is very much active there, and they're neither close-minded nor stupid. They hate things like IE6 and love jQuery as much as anyone here would. Not surprising, considering MSFT have hired a lot of smart OSS-minded people in the past decade.

My guess is that they're only trying to vet unifying the interface part of Windows 8 as hard as they can currently. Despite the new DX9-level graphics requirements, Win8 is otherwise seriously fast enough to be run on modern smartphones. If you stripped out that crap, it'd be faster than Win7, probably faster than XP.

And since ribbons were brought up, Office 2007's ribbons sucked, just like Vista did. Office 2010's actually worked and is what it should have been. Digging through tons of 1980s-Macintosh style menus in Office2k3 or OOO to do things like data bars or text-to-columns a spreadsheet plain sucks. Tabbing through common tasks is far nicer. Four tabs and nothing's buried in Win8 explorer.

The trend in computing is pretty clear: outside of some small niches here and there, it goes: mainframe -> workstation -> PC -> mobile (tablets/smartphones). Ribbonization makes products more suitable for the up and coming mobile world, and it seems like about the only time I can remember that Microsoft was actually on the leading side of the curve rather than the trailing side.

Ubutu has tried this too with Unity, but their attempt at mobile friendliness is a bit of a disaster.

Having had to deal with RE-LEARNING MSOffice pretty much from the ground-up due to "ribbonization", I have to ask: What is the difference between a "Ribbon" and a "Toolbar"? They both take up valuable screen real-estate, and in the case of the Ribbon, I don't think they are as customizable as the old Toolbars were (I might be wrong on that point, though).

Like so, so many of MS' "innovations", the Ribbon seems like change for change's sake. Now, instead of pawing through menus to find the command I am look

It's just a way for old users to feel even more superior. If you can get the job done in vi before they've even found the right ribbon there is something wrong. The same goes with older versions of MS Office and keyboard shortcuts.

I've used 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2011. They keep changing the UI, not necessarily for the worse, but just moving stuff around. My employer apparently is buying 2012 soon, so I'll see if there's anything interesting in there. For the most part the improvements I'm noticing in latest releases seem aimed at 3d.

The interface duh. The fscking article and whole of the discussion are about interfaces. Yes, phones and tablets have been around for a long time, but the interfaces sucked until Apple kicked everyone's ass with the iPhone. No, I will never own an iPhone, but yes I do appreciate that they were the first people to actually design an OS that worked well with a touchscreen.

As for previous interfaces, have you ever used Windows Mobile or CE? Especially in the Pre 6.5 days. The interface was basically just a small version of desktop windows - which also is horrible on a touchscreen. All the buttons are tiny. Stupidly simple things like that, for some reason nobody bothered to do anything about it until Apple released iOS. I knew that the interface was the weakest point in my smart phones, but Windows Mobile was still the best option for me until Androi

Which OS design ideas? Be specific because it can't be the GUI which is completely different and follows completely different principles (yes I'm just talking about Metro, of course the fact that it can still run a Windows 7 alike desktop is completely different).

So what is it? Lower level OS architecture? Can't be. E.g. Apple managed to barely fix ASLR only in Lion. Microsoft has it working since ages.

It must be gestures then. Who would have thought that once touchscreen technology advanced, things could b

"and good job MS, you cant even settle on a standard UI anymore, you have classic, ribbion and now metro all fighting for our mouseclicks, how the hell does that help anyone when every freaking window has a gd new U I!?!?"

And they say that Windows developers learned nothing from Linux!(runs)

Hi, this is your new car. The controls are dynamically adaptable! The radio station display is large and bright and shiny but the stations have no numbers or text labels. And the gas pedal is mouse-driven. Now, if you want to accelerate, use the 'accelerate gesture' with your hand in the air and move the cursor on the windshield forward, unless it's rainy, and then you have turn on 'rainy day cursor' which makes it about a foot wide at the top of the windshield. If you have any problems, click the "Ford Of

They kind of are, in that if you're a windows app on ARM, you're going to run using Metro. x86 apps can use Metro or the normal Desktop. While there'll be cross-platform Metro apps, their primary use will be for portable ARM devices.

Been there, tried that for 3.5 years after seeing Vista was the future of Windows. Win7 brought me back, if Metro is something I abhor then I got no problem making 7 the new XP and keeping it for many years to come. Besides, you typically get one generation of "classic" mode so I'd say at worst it becomes hopeless when Win8 support ends around 2020 or so. And there's Mac, but I figure they're heading down the same path Microsoft is, in fact a bit further up the road. Mostly I'm anxious to see what happens t

ASUS figured that out with the netbooks but they also have a large laptop section that depends on cheap MS Windows licences to be competitive. Thus at a trade show a few years ago the CEO was singing the praises of his linux netbooks in the morning and made a PUBLIC APOLOGY about them not having MS Windows in the afternoon, and then dropped the entire linux product line. He'd had lunch with some people from Microsoft.There was an article about that incident here at the time.The details of whatever deal or

Someone will figure out how to attract the generic consumer at some point.

The only way this will happen is by changing Linux, not changing the message.

Android seems to be doing well.

Android isn't Linux. It merely uses a highly modified Linux kernel.

LAMP seems to be doing well (not really a consumer product, but it does have a consumer facing aspect since it is an option when purchasing web hosting, which many average people are doing today).

Exactly. Every single consumer success for Linux happens everywhere *except* the desktop.

All Linux needs is a good spokesman.

Linux's problem has absolutely nothing to do with marketing. People just simply don't give a shit about free (libre), because there's no practical value to them. And commercial operating systems aren't expensive enough to make people care about free (gratis).

Apple and iPad are slowly, but surely, fracturing Microsoft's monopoly. When "does it run Windows apps?" becomes irrelevant, because you can do what you want to do and need to do on any platform, Microsoft's whole house of cards will start collapsing.

It will be years yet, but MS is losing its monopoly, and that's all it has. Being a cheat and bully is all they know how to do now.

You don't need to use C++/CX to write a WinRT application - WinRT is COM at heart, after all. It helps a lot, because you don't have to deal with a clusterfuck of smart pointers like CComPtr<T> and CComQIPtr<T>, or macros like COM_INTERFACE_ENTRY to implement your QueryInterface, or checking HRESULT return values after every call for error codes. But for an old code base, you're good as is.

Matter of fact, even for the new apps, the official recommendation is "use ISO C++ for all your code that d